Timeline = Time for Social Media Audit, Plan

Auditing what you and your company are revealing is critical to protecting privacy and minimizing potential PR issues.

It’s Tough to Beat a PR Message Delivered by Cannonball

It’s that time of year. The publications, trade and consumer, online and traditional, are proclaiming their best and worst of 2011. I’ll just give you one recent and personal chart-topper.

The Discovery Channel show, “MythBusters,” while filming at a Bay Area sheriff’s department bomb range, accidentally launched a cannonball into a home and a minivan. The news and the program’s often odd-ball hosts were named in major news outlets around the country.

The Discovery Channel’s and “MythBusters’” response was thoughtful and complete on day one. Resulting coverage assured the public that

1. no one was hurt;
2. Discovery Channel took responsibility;
3. all appropriate and proper safety protocols were followed (in fact, a sheriff’s department safety expert was on the scene when the “bounce” happened);
4. the incident was bizarre and unprecedented in show’s history (with details on the cannonball’s trajectory); and
5. the incident would not air.

Then, on day two, when many a successful crisis communicator might have been content to rest on the mountain of not-terribly-damaging coverage clippings, the show’s two hosts went out to publicly survey the damage, express their “embarrassment” (look at that, raw emotion!) and personally apologize to those impacted – even going so far as to decline to smile in fan photos since it wasn’t “a smiling time.”

Nicely done, Discovery Channel and “MythBusters.”  There’s definitely something to be said for a human response to a PR crisis!

-          Traci Stuart

Locking Down Key Online Real Estate

Online professional brands are incredibly important assets that you need to control. As the baseball playoffs continue today, fans will flock to www.MLB.com. However, many may now know that the website was once the property of law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius.

While this particular situation was apparently resolved without any payout, it highlights the importance of locking down key online real estate, which no longer just includes domain names, but also involves Facebook pages and Twitter handles.

The dynamic nature of the Internet is such that even if you only post a simple website, you need to do some due diligence and anticipate both user behavior and future needs. Your website and online properties are increasingly the best conduits for conveying your company’s message.  Bear in mind, 65 percent of U.S. adults are now using social media, so surely someone is searching for your company.

Cybersquatting and Typosquatting

Cybersquatting is the practice of registering domain names with the intent of forcing a payout from a party whose intellectual property or brand are directly or indirectly associated with the url.  A related practice is typosquatting wherein a site is registered with a url address that is one or two letters off from another site in hopes of misdirecting users or again forcing an organization to purchase the domain.

Each and every business should register all potential deviations of their URL address. These are valuable properties that you need to control. You can then redirect users who make a typo or who guess an address that is not your company’s official url to the correct homepage.

For example, www.Coke.com redirects to www.Coca-Cola.com. As such, XXYlawyers.com or XYZlaw.com could redirect to XYZlawfirm.com. The cost in doing so is small and the process easy. Compare this to the cost of having a rogue individual redirecting clients to false or misleading information.

Suffixes!

While .com is the dominant suffix, .net and .org are the most prominent in a dizzying array of additional web suffixes.  You may want to consider snapping up.net and .org and redirect them to your main website. The White House, which is http://www.whitehouse.gov, once had to deal with the pesky issue of http://www.whitehouse.com ,which for a number of years was a pornographic website. Yikes!

Social Media Squatters

The practice of cybersquatting is also occurring on social media websites. As rapid adoption of social media continues, more companies are planting their virtual flags on Twitter and Facebook. Even if your organization is not ready to make the jump to an active Twitter feed or Facebook page, it should reserve spaces on these social media networks.

Reserving multiple Twitter handles is free and a sound defensive strategy for both future branding entrees and for public relations efforts. The fictional XYZ law Firm could reserve handles such as @xyzlaw, @xyzlawyers, @xzylawfirm and even @xyzsucks. (It is always a good idea to protect against potential disgruntled individuals.)

The firm could also register Facebook pages of different names so as to own that real estate. However, be aware that you need 25 “likes” to secure a Facebook URL that is shortened, such as facebook.com/xyzlawfirm.

Even if you don’t populate these pages, it is good to own the real estate and the brand extensions.

Checklist

• Have you registered all website variations of your company’s name?
• Have you investigated purchasing .org or .net suffixes?
• Have you thought about and registered potential typos that could misdirect users?
• Have you registered domain names that could damage your brand? (i.e. XYZlawsucks.com)
• Have you registered Twitter handles for your company and brands?
• Have you registered a YouTube handle for your company?
• Have you considered creating a Facebook page and working to get a shortened URL?

Insurance

Insurance policies can’t cover everything, but they can provide you with peace of mind with respect to many potential disasters. Creating a well-thought out and strategic online plan, complete with strategic real estate buys, can help your business tremendously and provide you with similar peace of mind. Taking the time to be strategic in crafting branding and communications plans is critical.

-  Michael Bond

 

Lessons from Netflix’s Summer of Discontent

It hasn’t been a blockbuster summer for Netflix. First, they raised prices, and now they are causing great ire by deciding to split their DVD business from their streaming business. Netflix’s moves have caused more than a million defections, tremendous scorn in social media channels and a slumping stock price. What can a professional services firm learn from Netflix’s miscues? Plenty.

Looks Matter!

The reality is that looks matter.

Avoid “Situations” by Taking an Active Role in Brand Management

While for most companies there is not such an overt association with a questionable character, very real brand and reputational management — ahem — situations exists. Simply put, your reputation and brand are far too critical to not actively monitor and manage.

Go Ahead Switch to Decaf, There’s Better Ways to Refill Your Energy Tank

Having worked in-house at law firms for four years, I am acutely aware of the strains that are generally put on legal marketers. Wearing many different hats and being able to effectively manage numerous channels of information and projects is – even to the very best at doing it – an extremely difficult and energy intensive thing to do. This is why I found a recent New York Times article so interesting.

Near the beginning of the article, an extremely spot-on exchange is relayed:

Tony, it’s unsustainable,” he said, almost as if he was making a confession.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I have 1,000 unread e-mails in my inbox,” he told me. “I can’t imagine I’m ever going to get through all of them.”

“Are any of them important?” I asked.

“How would I know?” he said ruefully.

How many busy professionals, if being entirely honest, would say the same thing? But, listen to this:

During the day, we oscillate every 90 minutes from higher to lower alertness. In effect, our bodies are asking us for a break every 90 minutes. But we override the signals with coffee, sugar and our stress hormones.

For professionals, one of the answers to this avalanche of emails and endless coffee (of which I am an offender) – and one that deviates from suggestions in the article such as integrating nap pods – is to be smarter by managing the flow of information and tasks into and out of our virtual “In Box.” By employing third-party service providers – such as public relations firms – companies can do more in a shorter time period. Branding agencies and PR firms can off-load pivotal tasks so strained departments can focus on the other 800 emails coming. Forming partnerships can virtually grow a firm’s marketing department and reduce stress for marketers.

Speaking from personal experience, the other key advantage of forming partnerships with content specialists is the outside perspective they bring in. Any organization will miss opportunities and fall into the dreaded group-think if they do not seek answers outside their walls. Remember, someone at GM must have thought the Pontiac Aztek was a pretty good looking car.

- Michael Bond

Lack of Ethics Leads to Black Eye for PR Industry

As a public relations agency, we adhere to the ethics guidelines set forth and agreed upon by our industry.  Not only do we owe this to the PR trade but to our clients and journalists, who are bound by their own respective industry ethics.  The key word here is ethics, a concept central to effectively representing clients and building relationships with journalists.

So it is unfortunate that Burson-Marsteller ignored its commitment to PR ethics. The mega-agency created a whisper campaign to get top-tier media outlets, including USA Today, to run news stories and editorials berating Google’s privacy.  Former CNBC news anchor Jim Goldman and former political columnist John Mercurio, both recent Burson-Marsteller hires, were active in the media pitching – until they were asked which client they represented.  The radio signal then went silent.

Burson-Marsteller even approached an influential blogger, Chris Soghoian, offering to assist in writing a Google-bashing op-ed and promising to place it in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico and The Huffington Post.  Again, when asked about the client involved, the radio signal went silent.  So Soghoian denied the request and posted the entire email exchange.

After the email exchange went public and USA Today reported that many claims in Burson-Marsteller’s pitch were false, The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons became suspicious and eventually outed Facebook as the anonymous client.  Describing the scenario, Lyons wrote:

Here were two guys from one of the biggest PR agencies in the world, blustering aroundSilicon Valleylike a pair of Keystone Kops.

Here are two former journalists, working for one of the world’s largest PR firms, making false claims and refusing transparency.  Only after Facebook admitted its role, did Burson-Marsteller release the following statement:

Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client.

 The client requested that its name be withheld on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light and such information could then be independently and easily replicated by any media. Any information brought to media attention raised fair questions, was in the public domain, and was in any event for the media to verify through independent sources.

Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.

Too little, too late.  As Media Bistro points out, Burson-Marsteller should have refused the campaign:

For publicists, one of the many lessons of this story is that, as a PR professional, sometimes you have to discuss alternatives or decline a client’s request when the work is improper.

One the six core tenets of the Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) Code is “honesty.”  PR firms are expected to “reveal the sponsors for causes and interests represented” and “avoid deceptive practices.”

If Burson-Marsteller had followed this tenet, been upfront about its client and used solid facts when pitching, the story would have ended quite differently (avoiding the black eye the PR industry wears today).   As PRSA points out on its blog, “the ironic thing is that Burson-Marsteller got exactly what it wanted: a big article in USA Today talking about privacy concerns with Google’s services.”

-          Chuck Brown

What’s a Brand Worth? $153 Billion, Apparently.

Have you ever pondered how much your company’s brand is worth? This is one of those squishy questions that are important, but very hard to determine. The folks over at Millward Brown took a stab at this question and produced what they consider to be the top 100 brands and the monetary value for each.

This year, Apple, maker of the ubiquitous iPhone and iPad, topped the list with a brand worth of an astounding estimated $153 billion. But really, what does that number mean? Some great insight was provided by Andrew Zolli of PopTech quoted on American Public Media’s Marketplace:

Someone famously said of Coca-Cola that if you burnt down every one of their factories, they’d be back in business in a quarter. If you knocked everybody on earth over the head and gave them amnesia, they’d be out of business in a quarter. And the reason for that is that their brand really exists in all of our minds.

That is a pretty succinct way of looking at the power of a brand. It is also worth noting that Apple, before Steve Jobs came back, was floundering but its dented brand still held great allure. Iconic commercials, like 1984, helped cement the company in the public’s collective conscience. Simply put, it was easier for Apple to come back because people knew who they were.

Branding professional services firms is considered more challenging than branding consumer products. In fact of the top 100 brands, according to Millward Brown, only Accenture made the list.

This is not to say that branding cannot and should not be undertaken by entities such as accounting firms or law firms. Rather, it is essential that it is. The tendency of professional services firms to have employees operating as semi-autonomous business entities hurts cross-marketing capabilities and hinders a company when they set out to achieve long-term goals.

What Does a Brand Mean?

A brand affects all aspects of an organization from the look-and-feel of business cards to the nuts and bolts of the services provided. With a clearly defined brand, consistently reinforced in thought-leadership pieces and marketing, a company develops an identity and consumers begin to attach qualities to an organization. Apple is worth a tremendous amount because consumers have the expectation that its devices will be cutting-edge and user-friendly. (Even their battery charger is supposed to be innovative.) A law or accounting firm, when properly branded, can cause clients to feel about them in similar ways. XYZ firm is honest, dependable and forward-thinking. This, in turn, may lead to increased business from existing clients or favorable reviews to potential new business sources.

- Michael Bond

Related Content:

Protect Your Brand – Use Caution When Jumping on the Royal Wedding Media Bandwagon

Remember, the point of conducting a public relations campaign is to reinforce your brand. For example, how does a press release announcing a new law firm partner serve the brand when it appears on a Royal Wedding News website? Better examples include law firms focusing on pre-nuptial agreements, issues for workers on a national holiday and the licensing of wedding merchandise.